Original subtitles

This is the story

of an incredible scientific adventure,

of an unlikely collection of scientists and engineers,

dreamers and schemers, who attempted the impossible...

Aaaah!

To control gravity.

Gravity is the fundamental force

that holds us to the earth and binds the universe together,

yet, we still don't fully understand it.

Gravity is the most mysterious

of all the fundamental forces.

The ultimate challenge I can think of,

as a scientist, is to control gravity.

The scientific quest triggered a race

between rival corporations, government, and military.

It can destroy the missiles

or remove them from their trajectory.

Fueled by the paranoid fear of missing

the greatest technological advance in history.

If just one idea works,

if only partly,

you won the jackpot!

If the dream of gravity control ever came true,

it would revolutionize the world

and could send us to the stars.

Aaaaah!

Aaah!

Captions by vitac www.Vitac.Com

captions paid for by Discovery communications

In the late 1980s,

aerospace engineer Ron Evans was working

in the defense industry in lancashire, england.

He'd been trying to find a way to detect stealth bombers

using fluctuations in gravity

and he wondered if he could take it even further.

Could he use gravity to levitate a plane?

Of course, it was impossible.

But Ron did something a bit reckless.

He asked his employer if they'd let him try.

Ron's employer was the biggest defense

and aerospace contractor in Europe: Bae systems.

And, instead of telling him to have a cup of tea and a nap,

they listened.

I had to go to the head of the technology board...

it's a panel...

and persuade them that it was worth doing.

Now, clearly, it was very speculative.

I had to go away

and come up with some concepts and come up with some ideas

that could actually feature an antigravity

or a gravity-type propulsion system.

Well, this is one of the designs that we came up with.

For start, it wouldn't be limited

to just flying in the air.

It could fly anywhere, into space, even into water.

And, of course, it was a vertical takeoff design

because it had a gravity engine inside.

But it didn't look very exciting

and so we asked the artist

to put some green rays underneath.

That made it look far more futuristic.

Let's be clear

that not everyone in the company thought we should be doing it.

There were quite a few that felt "we make aircraft.

We're good at it and that's what we should be doing."

But there were a few,

and some very senior people, that felt, "okay."

Let's just have a little look at the future"

and the concept became known as Greenglow.

As head of Project Greenglow,

Ron's job was to find and develop

advanced propulsion systems to overcome gravity.

The potential was enormous, if it happened.

It would totally change aerospace.

And Ron was not alone.

At around the same time, in the U.S.,

NASA began a parallel project,

headed by aerospace engineer Marc Millis.

It was around 1996 when I was asked

to lead the breakthrough propulsion physics project.

Things like nonrocket space drives,

interstellar propulsion,

and manipulating gravity, things like that.

For that project, the idea was to think radical, think big.

Today, NASA says it has moved on

and doesn't want to look back.

We can't go in there to talk about it now

because NASA's not doing that work right now.

At bae systems, the same situation:

The company no longer wants to discuss Project Greenglow.

We asked whether we could go there and talk to them about it

and they just said no.

Gravity control is a dark and dangerous science,

but, like modern-day alchemy, it promises a glittering prize.

But it can destroy your reputation.

Years earlier, Ron had watched a gravity experiment

bring down one of britain's best-known scientists...

this time, I call for a volunteer.

Professor of engineering at imperial college London

Eric Laithwaite.

And then, we're gonna SPiN up

the biggest gyro of the day, which is here.

Like millions of others, Ron had been spellbound

by Laithwaite's Christmas lecture

at the royal institution in 1974.

I can make him raise it.

Now...

Laithwaite suggested that, by spinning a heavy wheel,

you could make it counteract gravity.

Ron has returned to the royal institution

to try and recreate the effect.

- Does it feel light? - It does. It feels very light.

With the help of fellow engineer

Dr. Adam Wojciech.

If I slow down, it feels...

what I think was at the back of Laithwaite's mind

was that there was a force

in one direction more than in the other

and so the gyro will start to rise up

and that gives you the illusion as though it's losing weight.

It isn't.

It's just an illusion.

It isn't light.

When a gyroscope is rotated in the same direction

it's spinning, it's given an upward lift.

And if I rotate in the opposite sense.

Ohhh, that does look heavy.

Oh, careful, careful, careful. Wow.

When it's rotated in the opposite direction,

the opposite happens and it seems to get heavier.

Still hoping to make gravity control

a subject of serious research,

Laithwaite acknowledged his mistake.

Yet, his reputation was permanently damaged.

He was snubbed by the academic establishment.

And felt compelled to leave his position

at the royal institution.

Professor Laithwaite got into a lot of trouble

with this, really, because of the claim

that it got lighter, which is antigravity,

and academics jump on any antigravity device

as being impossible!

Well, it's not impossible.

It's just we don't know how to do it.

But we should look.

It's like flight in the last century.

In those days, anybody that said they could fly

was looked upon as a lunatic!

The difference is that, before humans could fly,

we knew birds could.

We could study aerodynamics.

But there was nothing we knew of

that could actually overcome gravity.

The dream of lifting effortlessly from the earth

is not confined to engineers.

Despite being so contentious,

many academics are rather seduced by the idea.

Dr. Tamara Davis is among them.

From a little kid, I always wanted to go

and visit other planets and go up into space

and to be able to have a form of propulsion

that could get me there easily would be fantastic.

But we don't yet know whether we can manipulate gravity

or have any control over it.

There is one, fundamental force

we know we can control,

which we've used to build our modern world:

Electromagnetism.

It gives us a tantalizing illusion of gravity control

when we levitate a magnet.

Ta-da!

Electromagnetic propulsion

balances the weight of the magnet

by using the same magnetic polarity in the base.

We know that like charges repel,

so, here, we just have a magnetic field

that's levitating a magnet.

So this is nothing mysterious.

This is just electromagnetism.

Let's see if I can get this across.

Ah.

The power of control we get from electromagnetism

lies in the fact that we can change its polarity

and make it either repel or attract.

So, in electromagnetism, we have positive charges

and negative charges and they tend to attract each other.

If you have a positive charge and a positive charge,

it will repel from each other, but wouldn't it be great

if we could get gravity to where it can reverse

and be able to levitate things using gravity?

Only problem is there isn't any negative gravity.

There isn't any antigravity that pushes.

Gravity always pulls, as far as we now.

The reason seems to be that, unlike electromagnetism,

gravity has only kind of polarity:

Positive.

One mass is simply attracted to another.

Gravity and electromagnetism are completely different forces.

There's a very special property of gravity.

That is that it adds up.

Inside an atom, there's a positive nucleus

surrounded by negative electrons.

So the electromagnetic value cancels out,

whereas, there's nothing to cancel out its mass.

So the force on one atom

adds to the force on another atom

and so they generate an attractive gravitational force,

so, if you get enough of those atoms together,

like in a planet or in a star,

then the gravitational force is very strong.

So, gravity is different.

It adds up as you increase the amount of matter,

in a way the other forces don't.

In 1996, a Russian scientist working in Finland

claimed to have done the very thing

the skeptics said was impossible:

Control gravity.

Dr. Eugene Podkletnov

had been using a machine called a cryostat

to cool electrical superconductors

when something very strange happened.

One evening, we were working with our cryostat

and one of my colleagues, who was leaving at that time,

just came to the laboratory and said,

"guys, what are you doing here?" And we said, "just working."

And he was smoking his pipe.

A very interesting person.

It is, by the way, not allowed, to smoke a pipe

in the laboratory, but it was late in the evening.

And he blew his pipe over the cryostat

and the smoke went close to the cryostat,

hit some unseen barrier, and, very fast, went up.

And it was pretty amazing.

He repeated this several times

and said, "you are working with magic things" and he left.

So that was the beginning.

After months of investigation,

Podkletnov concluded that what he'd created was

an antigravity field.

So we have a vacuum chamber with a disc

which can be rotated over 10,000 rotations per minute.

And this is a weight sample

which can move freely over the disc.

And when the disc reaches a certain speed of rotation,

it exerts a repulsive force on the weight sample

and pushes it up.

In fact, this is a direct demonstration

of the gravity field.

This gravity field is, in our case, repulsive

and, as you can see,

the repulsive force is pretty big.

Hearing about the experiment,

Ron Evans organized a team at Greenglow

to try to recreate Podkletnov's breakthrough.

But they didn't have the budget

to work with the highly specialized superconductor.

We couldn't replicate what he'd done,

so we couldn't say, yes, he had found it, in effect;

or no, he hadn't.

By now, Marc Millis at NASA also wanted to know

if there was something in Podkletnov's claim

and he had a much bigger budget.

We found people who replicated the experiment

with Podkletnov's help and they even had 50 times

the detection sensitivity that Podkletnov had had,

and did not find any effect.

Despite exhaustive tests,

no one seemed able to reproduce

Podkletnov's so-called gravity field.

I think Podkletnov had jumped to a conclusion,

had seen some things,

and did not take the rigor to go through and make sure

that he wasn't misleading himself.

Meanwhile, news of Podkletnov's breakthrough

had been leaked to the press and the resulting media storm

ultimately forced him to leave his university position.

So Podkletnov went back to Moscow, to work in secret

and, by late 2001, he had claimed

he had a new way to manipulate gravity.

Wary of the western media, he contacted the one man

he trusted to give him a fair hearing:

Ron Evans, at Greenglow.

Because of his security conCERNs,

Podkletnov was only prepared to tell Ron the basic concept.

I presented to him

my latest works with impulse gravity generator,

which gives a very sharp impulse of gravity waves.

It's really a giant spark plug, really,

but, according to Dr. Podkletnov,

someone way away, a kilometer away,

on the balcony of some flats in line with the beam,

were still able to detect a slight effect.

That was incredible.

For years, the gravity pulse concept

remained shrouded in secrecy and stayed unproven.

But, by the early 2000s, a new generation of scientists

had picked up the Baton from Project Greenglow,

including Dr. Martin Tajmar,

professor of space systems at Dresden university.

If you look for a challenge,

always look for a big challenge.

The ultimate challenge I can think of as a scientist

is to control gravity.

That's maybe the most difficult thing there is, right?

Martin is about to comprehensively test

Podkletnov's concept, once and for all.

His claims are that they can drill holes

into brick walls and this kind of stuff,

which is an extraordinary claim.

And, if you have an extraordinary claim,

you must have extraordinary proof.

Antigravity is a kind of synonym for the impossible.

But always be ready for the surprise.

This, in effect,

is Podkletnov's gravity pulse generator,

recreated by Martin and his team.

As Ron Evans guessed, it's based in a kind of

giant spark plug; Essentially, two electrodes in a box.

Basically, you have two electrodes,

one here and one here

and you're running a very, very high

electric current discharge through that.

This discharge goes through a superconductor.

According to Podkletnov,

this somehow creates a pulse of gravity which is picked up

by a sensor acting like an electronic pendulum.

And let's say if you have your pendulum here,

that, when this gravitational impulse hits the pendulum,

you will actually get a deflection of the pendulum.

And so the claim is that this is actually also creating

not only an electric discharge,

but a kind of a gravitational impulse,

a push to something at a distance.

The superconductor is cooled with liquid nitrogen

to remove its electrical resistance.

Podkletnov claimed the resulting massive electrical discharge

creates the gravitational pulse.

They switch on the power to charge up the system

and wait for the discharge.

Counting down.

There is a reading.

So here's the data.

Gravity goes with the speed of light,

so you should see an instantaneous peak

and then the sound from this bang,

this takes some time until it arrives,

so we should see two distinct peaks

because we have such a high time resolution.

So that's the acoustic impulse and exactly here,

that's where the gravitational impulse should be,

where we don't see it.

The sensor felt the sound wave from the spark,

but no gravity pulse.

That's the most sensitive sensor there is in the world

and we don't even see something out of the noise,

so how can he make a claim to say that it moved things

meters away or that it actually pushed pendulums away?

So that's a really outrageous claim.

We haven't seen something not even remotely like that, so.

Unfortunately, but, yeah, so far, no luck.

None of Podkletnov's methods

seem to be able to alter gravity in the lab.

Could the reason be a simple problem of scale?

There is one industry

that has to deal with gravity on a planetary scale:

The space business.

They're always clamoring for some form

of gravity-beating propulsion.

Marc Millis ran NASA's breakthrough propulsion project.

One of its long-term goals was to move away from using rockets.

The problem with rockets is not that they can't beat gravity.

It's the amount of thrust they need to do it.

If you think about the Apollo spacecraft

and you imagine here's saturn 5,

the very tip of that and then a little bit below that

was the actual spacecraft, itself,

and all the rest of this was the propellant,

the rocket fuel, and that's just to the moon.

NASA plans to get humans to Mars and back

within the next 15 years

and, maybe one day, beyond the solar system, itself.

But just the martian step

seems impractical with conventional rockets

because leaving the earth's gravity takes some much fuel.

The farther or faster that you wanna go,

or more that you wanna carry,

you need this extra propellant to do that and then,

you need extra propellant for the extra propellant

and it adds up exponentially.

If you wanted to go to our nearest neighboring star,

which is over 4 light-years away,

and you wanted to do it with the kind of rockets

that are on the space shuttle,

and say you wanna do it in 50 years,

you're having to go 1/10 of the speed of light.

Well, the amount of propellant you need for that journey is

about the mass of our entire sun.

For Marc Millis and NASA,

the focus was less on controlling gravity, itself,

than finding ways to get to the stars.

They didn't care how long,

as long as it didn't need rocket fuel.

Then in 2002, a new device appeared

that seemed to offer a solution.

Invented by a former defense research engineer,

Roger shawyer.

The big advantage of emdrive is that it's a device

which creates a force, but it doesn't have to

shoot out a propellant out of the back.

Instead of using rocket fuel to create thrust,

the emdrive uses microwave energy,

just like a domestic oven.

Microwaves bounce around inside the box in waves,

cooking your food.

To stop that energy cooking you,

there is a mesh on the door with holes in it.

The diameter of these holes are so small that,

instead of going through it, microwave radiation

is actually bouncing up and down vertically in the hole.

The holes trap the waves,

slowing them to a standstill.

According to Roger,

the narrow end of his emdrive does exactly the same job.

The waves are going faster at the large end

than they are at the small end.

This means that the force at the large end

is greater than the force at the small end,

which will cause the cavity to move in the opposite direction.

It would only produce a small amount of thrust,

but, in space, that wouldn't matter.

An emdrive thruster with continuous electrical power

gives you continuous acceleration

and therefore, you can achieve

very large velocities

and travel very large distances.

Roger believes that, if he could make it big enough,

it could potentially lift us from the earth.

You suddenly have a lift engine

which simply hovers there

or, indeed, accelerates upwards,

so, we can obviously envisage

launching large payloads into space

on a emdrive-driven space plane.

Essentially, we are no longer looking at ways

that we can control gravity, itself.

We are beating gravity the smart way.

If it works.

Though he didn't claim to control gravity,

Roger's emdrive concept

was rejected by a lot of theoretical scientists,

who claimed the basic physics just didn't add up.

To settle the argument between the theorists and engineers,

Martin Tajmar had the perfect test facility in Dresden.

A large vacuum chamber mounted on dampers,

to isolate it from the surrounding world,

a carefully designed rig to hold the drive

with a finely tuned balance to record any thrust...

And, most importantly,

a copy of Roger shawyer's original emdrive.

Martin's version is small, but, if the principal works,

there should be measurable thrust.

The vacuum chamber is sealed.

The thrust recorder inside is so sensitive,

it can detect Martin sitting down outside.

We're here in a laboratory on earth,

so there's some seismic movement.

So the balance itself will move just a little bit.

That's the noise we are seeing here.

The emdrive is switched on.

Nothing appears to move.

But, on Martin's screen, there is a reading.

When we turn on the thruster, the balance, indeed, reacts

and we measure something which looks actually like a thrust.

What we are measuring here in this case

is of like 25 micronewtons.

That's very, very small.

You can compare this, for example,

to 1/10 of the weight force

of a grain of rice, Incredibly small.

Still, however, useful, for example.

In space, we have thrusters, actually,

which have this tiny amount of force,

which is still useful to maneuver spacecraft,

for instance.

The first results seem positive.

But, when Martin experimented further,

he discovered a problem.

So, with the thruster pointing in that direction,

we measured thrust in that direction

and, when we tilted it 90°, however,

we still measured thrust in this direction,

which we shouldn't have.

There can still be some major influence from,

for example, the power-feeding lines

that we still need to solve, to find out

what's the real thrust produced by the emdrive,

if there is any thrust produced.

The great hope of the emdrive was that,

as a kind of propellantless rocket,

it would at least power vehicles in space: NASA's dream.

But NASA didn't pursue the idea any further,

or any other gravity-defying concepts, because, in 2002,

they discontinued Marc Millis's project.

The project ended when the funding

for all propulsion research was cut.

It wasn't just breakthrough propulsion physics.

It was a congressional earmark to build a building

in a certain state and that took all the funding.

It happens.

Main progress that we made is we took science-fiction notions

and evolved them to at least

the first step of the scientific method.

That step, by itself, is a degree of progress that,

if I don't accomplish any more,

it's like "yeah, that was pretty good."

Ron Evans kept going for another 3 years.

But, when he retired, in 2005,

bae closed down Project Greenglow.

Is it a shame?

Yeah, I suppose so.

I would like to have worked at a company

that actually made this idea work.

It was a lovely idea.

When Greenglow ended,

the hope of mastering gravity seemed to end with it.

If that was ever going to change,

we needed to go much deeper into how gravity actually worked.

Our understanding of gravity

has come down from Galileo, Newton, and Einstein,

from observations rooted in the motions of the heavens.

Now those same heavens seem to be showing us something

that looks remarkably like antigravity.

The idea that the universe

has some inherent form of antigravity is tantalizing.

If only we could get our hands on it.

The problem is no one knows what this antigravity force

actually is, only that it seems to originate from space, itself.

Although we think of space as this emptiness,

the absence of stuff, it actually isn't.

There is something that's intrinsic

to the nature of space that imparted an energy.

And one of the big mysteries is

where does that energy come from?

A number of scientists think the answer

to this big question could lie in the very small...

the very, very, very small... world of subatomic particles:

Quantum physics.

According to current quantum theory,

particles can spontaneously appear from nowhere.

Apparently, they just pop into existence

in the vacuum of space.

Matter and antimatter, which, because they're opposites,

cancel each other out in an instant.

The lifetime is one-thousandth

of one-billionth of one-billionth of a second.

We are now in an ocean of particle/antiparticle pairs,

permanently appearing and disappearing.

Dr. Dragan Hajduković

thinks something else happens to these particles

to produce an antigravity effect.

For the briefest moment of their existence,

these particles can be polarized, like iron filings.

The trouble is to get it in a random orientation.

If there is a magnetic field,

the random orientation will change.

Yes.

According to Dragan,

in the same way iron filings respond to a magnet,

pairs of quantum particles respond to mass.

With matter and antimatter, pairs are briefly

orienting themselves in relation to that mass.

Matter is attracted to the positive mass

of a planet or a star, while antimatter is repelled by it.

Dragan believes this creates a halo of

antigravity dark energy around every mass in the universe.

All these halos together has negative pressure,

what is exactly what we need, in cosmological equations,

to produce the accelerated expansion of the universe.

It means that there are both positive

and negative gravitational charges.

So far, we know that gravity's only attraction.

It may be that gravity

is also repulsion, but not between matter and matter,

but between matter and antimatter.

Dragan's theory, that the key to antigravity lies

in antimatter, is actually going to be tested.

Here, in the world's biggest physics lab,

at CERN, in Switzerland,

not in the famous large hadron collider,

but in the improbably named antimatter factory,

at its Alpha experiment.

A team led by Jeffrey Hangst

is building a machine that, in a couple of years,

will answer one of the biggest questions in gravity research:

Does antimatter fall down or up?

Hi, Dragan. Hi.

- Welcome to Alpha. - Good to see you again.

Come on in. Let's take a look at this machine.

Alpha is part of CERN's ongoing exploration

into the nature of matter and gravity.

So, right now, what we're doing is

we're routinely trapping antihydrogen.

But, for Dragan Hajduković, it will be make or break.

Trapping antihydrogen to prepare for the...

if he's right, creating antigravity on earth

is at least a theoretical possibility.

From Einstein's perspective, mass actually distorts

the fabric of space and time, or space-time, as it's called.

That distortion is rather like a well.

So here's another object that's moving nearby,

our mass that has bent space-time

and, as it goes past, it bends towards the massive object.

But a negative mass would be, in our analogy here,

something like a mound, instead of a depression.

And then you run into problems.

The problem, according to Einstein,

is that using a negative mass would mean inverting space-time,

effectively turning the fabric of the universe inside-out.

And what you end up with is something

that's called a runaway problem.

You have physics that is just running out of control.

It'll accelerate away arbitrarily

with zero cost of energy and, if that were really

happening anywhere in the universe,

we'd see it spectacularly becoming an unstable situation.

If Clifford Johnson

and other theoretical physicists are right,

antigravity propulsion will remain an unworkable dream.

It seems the laws of physics simply don't allow it.

At least, not as we understand those laws today.

Because, just as Galileo gave way to Newton

and Newton gave way to Einstein, theories do change.

And, in the meantime, well,

the engineers get on with doing what engineers do:

Building new kinds of propulsion.

Today, that includes NASA.

At the Glenn research laboratory in Ohio,

work is underway to produce new forms of space engines,

ones that really could take us where rockets can't:

Beyond our solar system.

What we have here is a high-powered ion thruster

and the way it produces thrust are

ions are created inside this ring

and then, we establish electrostatic potential

that accelerates these ions out and produces large velocities.

And what that does is

it gives us very efficient production of thrust.

This is an ion thruster under test,

pouring out a constant stream of charged particles.

It's less powerful than a rocket, but capable

of accelerating a spacecraft almost indefinitely.

These systems are ideal for in space, you know.

We operate them purely in space because it's very gentle.

You know, the thrust level is low,

but, over time, you can develop much higher velocities

than you can with chemical rockets.

NASA's focus is on space propulsion

beyond the earth's gravitation,

yet there is a propulsion concept

that aims to revolutionize all of aerospace,

resurrected from the days of Project Greenglow.

10 years ago, Project Greenglow ended

and Ron Evans thought

officially gravity research had ended with it.

But, today, he's been invited

to witness a unique gravitational breakthrough.

When Ron first began his gravity research,

Could gravity be used

to detect aircraft that were invisible to radar?

In the 1980s, our complete inability

to work with gravity made it impossible,

but, today, Ron is meeting someone who says he's done it.

This time, there are no covert meetings.

He's going inside england's ministry of defence

research laboratory at porton down.

Ron, good morning.

Welcome to defence science and technology.

Neil stansfield heads a department here

that looks at what they call disruptive technology.

And they've taken a potential step

on the road to gravity control using quantum engineering.

So what we have here is

our quantum gravity gradiometer.

It's a small system.

At the heart of the device,

we have a vacuum chamber.

The sensor uses lasers to freeze a cloud of atoms.

This cloud responds to disturbances

in the earth's gravitational field

caused by a moving mass.

The atoms are sensitive enough

to detect the mass of my body

at a range of about 1 meter.

So your gravitational field is affecting this device?

Yes.

This is the first time

Ron has seen anyone actually using gravity.

To me, this is amazing technology.

Getting into the quantum, that's really allowing us

to do things that

were just unbelievable 30 years ago.

Yes, some people use the phrase

"they break the laws of physics."

I prefer to say they break the laws of physics

as we understand them today.

A hundred years ago,

we didn't understand the quantum physics.

The idea of being able to measure changes

in gravity? Science-fiction.

Could never happen. Today, we can.

Yes.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Ron Evans's mission to control gravity began here,

in a cold, wet corner of lancashire,

where people go to live their dreams,

where no one ever worried about the word "impossible".

Aaaaah!

For Ron Evans, gravity control is just something

we haven't learned to do.

Yet.

I'm sure we will, one day.

It's just a matter of time.

Aaah!